video for your media project c.e.o. don carty dot com. coming up on r t the drums of war for syria grow louder as america moves warships closer to their shores while more u.s. politicians consider the idea of military intervention a large part of the u.s. public remains unpersuaded the latest updates just ahead. and u.s. colombian free trade deal signed back in two thousand and eleven is now causing colombian farmers huge problems the farmers have been protesting for more than a week leading to clashes with colombian authorities more on this story coming up. and why a p.d. officer was indicted on charges of lying about the arrest of a new york times photographer the officer claimed that the photographer was using a bright flash to interfere with another arrest but the camera didn't even have a flash more on this case later on tonight show.

good evening it's tuesday august twenty seventh eight pm here in washington d.c. i'm aaron aid and you're watching our two. we start our newscast tonight with the latest from syria u.s. officials have laid the groundwork for a possible military attack here's u.s. defense secretary chuck hagel speaking to the b.b.c. about the department of defense's preparedness device to say the options are there the united states department of defense is ready to carry out those options. if that would occur that would occur also in coordination with our international partners. these latest developments are in response to a chemical weapons attack that occurred outside of damascus on august twenty first the united states and its international allies say it is undeniable that syrian president bashar al assad and his regime launched those attacks now speaking from

damascus today syrian foreign minister walid moallem said he rejects quote utterly and completely that syrian armed forces have used chemical weapons u.s. navy destroyers have allegedly been moved closer to the shores of syria since the chemical attacks however according to a reuters poll intervention in the sovereign country is quite unpopular with americans around forty two percent of americans do not think we should intervene twenty eight percent believe we should and almost thirty percent say they don't know now despite these numbers n.b.c.'s n.b.c. news is reporting that military strikes on syria could begin as early as thursday. and now to colombia where agricultural workers are taking to the streets to protest the government's farming policies what started as a peasant uprising nine days ago has quickly spread throughout the country of these two hundred thousand people have launched demonstrations and blocked roads all in opposition to the u.s. colombia free trade agreement now protesters there are being met with intense

hostility from colombian police tear gas shooting torture and even sexual assaults have been reported colombia's defense minister juan carlos bin zone has claimed that the striking workers are being controlled by what he called terrorists from the revolutionary armed forces of colombia better known as far yesterday colombian president juan manuel santos said that his government will enter into negotiations with the agricultural workers but only if the roadblocks are lifted and after a meeting with the protest leaders from three of the worst affected province effective provinces santos said he is quote determined to confront the problem and work hand in hand with the farmers to see how we can get out of this situation now a situation that many believe was created by the u.s. colombian free trade agreement and agreements which were supposed to eliminate things like tariffs and other barriers on trade of goods and services between the u.s. and colombia however in practice it has increased the cost of items like fertilizer and fuel wall simultaneously flooding the colombian market with cheap imports to

discuss the current unrest in colombia and shed light on to how this free trade deal is playing out i was joined earlier by neil martin executive director of paseo internacional a colombia based labor solidarity organization i first asked him about the situation on the ground and what the protests look like. our principle for blockade was not by potato and onion farmer coffee growers in the dairy sector. roadblocks to prevent normal circulation throughout the country this is also been supported and added to by a workshop which is organized by truck drivers who aren't blocking but who are refusing to transport produce and other products are extra. as a result and model x. throughout colombia. ten department i think apparently.

they are luckily intended partner and this is been off till supported by indigenous communities unions student movements and. reaction part of the colombian armed forces have been and human rights organizations referred to as an excessive use of force. we've seen military personnel being protesters they have been reported to sexual soul stealing supplies and the protesters are using to maintain a cannons. and it was carried out in private residence and private business. and on warrants arrest and. at least the next fire on fire and protesters and we have reports that some people been killed

and told that connectivity the the other strongly warring phenomena is the best protest leaders. it's happened throughout this country and because particular attention to the rest of humor status. prominent opposition. little leader and also a lot of the members of go to negotiating team for the organization that were stricken he was arrested in a day. for. four reasons you know alleged involvement with talking me out now how to tell me how long have the protests been going on. there more than a week old now started last monday and they've been growing sort of steadily throughout the summer and speakin actually they were new blockades set up in unison tell me it's very close to bill and so the effect of the risk is congress is

starting to fill in very extremely. and the current situation is one of sort of kids calm because the government has entered into negotiations with leaders of the protests in various regions right now what are the agricultural workers what are their ultimate goal is would they like to see that the u.s. colombia free trade agreement be abolished. that is one of their demand they're starting to feel the effects of free trade agreement very sharply in effect for a year now and the cost of producing things like potatoes in coffee and milk in colombia simply can't compete with the prices of it for products that are coming in from other countries and one of the other demanded that we have is. our cultural territories be protected by mental standards. and the truck drivers

and the change earlier are asking for a reduction in the cost of gasoline only has one of the highest prices in the world and it's one of the largest producer of oil and of medicine see this is a contradiction and something that the colombian government remedy now is that a realistic or even possible to abolish this free trade agreement. well that's a very question it's a question that a lot of people are are asking and i don't think it's very likely the. administration will go back on any differentially with more likely is. that if anything will happen we're chatting in the coffee shop if you want to build a. large. in which the government agreed to raise the cap from is received and sort of you know the situation down for the time being in terms of real long term. agreements between the government and rural agricultural

sector i think it's going to be a lot more complicated because you really see that these farmers are sitting literally trading him in without overturning free trade agreement we don't want to be a real possibility for a lot from dialogue between. now who is benefiting in colombia from this free trade agreement. well colombian landowners are benefiting from three share in the canadian unfasten general but in addition to that not a national corporations are benefiting hugely from the free trade agreement we at ages will talk about economic policies a little bit more broadly as well in terms of what is reflected in the a liberal economic expansion in colombia which includes not only free trade but in practice nation public services including incursion of huge amounts of foreign capital and investment coming in the formal mining oil extraction

and agribusiness so these are the sectors that are that are benefiting from the free trade agreement and frankly the clinton farmers have. reason to be concerned about the situation given that five million people have been internally just i think on the many of them in the last ten years and i think people are very you know afraid that this this could end up being their fate as well right now what do you personally believe is the best solution for both the farmers and the country of colombia. well i think. you know a. comprehensive agricultural policy that you know takes into account small farmers as opposed massive agribusiness would be would be the best solution and i think things like the cost of gasoline are are also italy would be really rally. with what little is when you start to look at the end of the union they're involved in the strike now as well of who had almost

a demand and many of which are associated with. opposition to the privatization of public services through levels of health care union be ordered in lucille and student organizations emerge the student organizations and the biggest teachers' union for equality for all asking for you know the pride of place in education to be reversed so these are. more difficult. to address now i have one last question that i really want to get are can you talk about the relationship between the farmers and fark and it's important to know that fark is an organization considered as a terrorist group by the colombian government can you speak to to their relationship right there and it's a very important question because because one being in a state tends to use this rhetoric to not only to the legitimize grassroots protest movements in and this kind of mobilization that we're seeing currently but uses it as an excuse to use this association as an excuse for

you know repression of these movements and and in the public eye justifying even a lot of repression against protesters and they curse back is a very good example of the lack of substance to this as its argument because among other reasons that the reason in which this process the strongest explosion is not a region which is you know it's not a region which is which had armed conflicts not a region which has a very strong support for any of the syrian groups and again there has been no evidence provided as to the links between the guerrilla groups and protest movement ok thank you very much now that was neil martin the executive director of pasar internacional. in new york city a bronx district attorney announced yesterday that an n.y.p.d. officer was indicted on three felony counts and five misdemeanors after lying about the circumstances that led to the officers arrest of

a new york times photographer officer michael ackerman has been accused of fabricating his reasons for arresting photographer robert still art now acting claims that while trying to arrest a teenage girl last year so lark interfered by distracting the officer with the flash on his camera the bronx d.a.'s office has dispelled ackerman's accounts however after photographic evidence to term and that the photographer did not use a flush and didn't even have one on his camera at the time now if convicted on the top charges ackerman would lose his job and could face up to seven years in prison to talk about the case against ackerman and discuss the best policies for civilian officer interaction i was joined earlier by steve silberman executive director of lecture rights and i asked him how they discovered that ackerman had fabricated the police report. this ackerman case was interesting because they simply found a discrepancy with the photograph apparently the officer claimed that. that's a pretty used flash photography though in fact they were quickly able to look and

see that this was not true so the officer was clearly lying and the days where police officers can get away with with this sorts of abuse and straight up lying those days are simply over because cameras are now everywhere now is this case unusual in the sense that the officer was called out on his report and for his lie it is unusual and a positive thing that the officer is being held to account for his actions all too often people will see video of police doing agree just things in the officer simply gets to be away on leave and ultimately retains his or her job but in this case this is sending a very strong message to police leadership to send this message that whenever police officers violate the law that they will be held accountable as far as the law will allow and how often do we see officers exaggerating on their police reports or even outright line. very regularly and so it's increasingly so where you

simply police naturally it's not surprising that they are intimidated when people are recorded they're sort of not used to feeling like celebrities and haven't pop or see taking their picture recording all the time so i can understand identify with that so they can they don't want to have another account of what happened they would rather it be exactly what they remember and what they say whether it's fabricated or not but with the recording it's impossible for a police officer to a lie about what happened the fact is when police are being recorded and when citizens are being recorded there's a new program in california where police have little cameras the number of police incidents and complaints it just drops you know like eighty percent because the citizens are going to be on their best behavior of course police are going to act with a. according to the law and are able to do their jobs just fine while remaining within the law now as an average civilian what can we do to make sure that the police are held accountable to the reports that they do and basically the truthfulness into

their interactions with us the most i think technology in this is my camera right here and so imagine if i walk into somewhere there's a police encounter happening maybe i see a traffic in sin or something like that i want to record it i'm putting in my pass code very important to have a pass code to protect your phone. number and do have actually when you know when you're in that position you're going to if you want to train yourself to do this because you're going to be shaking a little bit i'm having my kik it's called q i k it's a great and i'm recording this right now you want to turn your phone this was you know in the vertical video and this is recording right now so if you're a police officer and you don't like the fact that i was recording you right now you might want to snatch this out of my hand but if i'm getting a feeling about to do that i just turn the phone off i didn't turn it off i actually put it to sleep and this is that automatically uploading it's my own i set my account to private and so you could take this you could smash it and i'm going to have the recording to show to my lawyer wow now do you think that high quality

recording devices that they've made officers more accountable obviously they have to be if they're being recorded but just in general the idea that these are more prevalent today's world that they've made officers more accountable for their actions when they're doing police work i think i salute lynne and i want to get into medical called rules for recording police you can find it through the flex your rights or website to really lay out exactly how you want to present yourself and exactly what you can do and how to use your technology in order to successfully record the police while reducing the likelihood of a bad incident happening that is the seven hundred thirty seconds let's hear it only in the first thing that everyone needs to understand first is that you always have the right to openly record on duty police officers no matter what about these bad laws and in illinois and massachusetts the. courts there have ruled them unconstitutional so first things first you need to understand you always have the right to record on duty police officer because the top three we've got to head out just a sound bite. you always want to flex your rights to do so police are asking for

your id officer there my friend you go i don't need to show you my id and my under arrest ok officer i don't consent to any searches more tips like this. or no and i wish we could hear more we're going to have to have you back to have you back to fill us in on all seven but that was steve silberman executive director of flexion rights thank you steve thank you. and in austin texas police are investigating a report of a bleach filled balloon being thrown at an african-american student on campus at the university of texas college junior brian davis was walking to his friend's apartment when he was unexpectedly interrupted by the so-called bleach bomb take a look i kind of just you know heard something kind of like it was exploding near me and i feel like a light sting on my leg people might look at it as a prank. you know to be a minority in such a large school even crimes like this does it come off the way you think it might

you know when you're going you know for me it was kind of humiliating and embarrassing now though some people claim the balloons hit minority students by chance davis believes he was targeted because he's african-american and it seems there were others as well last october austin police launched an investigation into four similar attacks on u.t. students all of which targeted asian and african-americans so to talk about the motivation behind these attacks and the implications this could have on minorities and higher education i was joined earlier by michael dunn's al smith blogger at the nation dot com and nobbler fellow at the nation institute i started off by asking him what the intention was with using such a powerful chemical and what type of harm this could cause someone. yeah i mean using bleach i mean this is a very dangerous chemical that we're dealing with and it's a cause great harm to someone if they were to ingest it was getting to their eyes and i think what you're seeing is if students of color are being targeted with

bleach bombs which you're seeing is something very very insidious about. the type of value that is placed on black and brown students and essentially saying that you know we should we should whitewash not just you know our textbooks our history but the actual people that join this campus and i think that's simply just the discuss thing act and i think to try to write it off as simply a prank is you know one of those of one of those things about this trying to forge a colorblind society in which we don't take race into a consideration as a factor in anything it if it means that we don't look at the root causes of this and we don't look at how to solve this problem now some people are saying that these breaches bombs they're not targeting minorities specifically and rather that these are just attacks that are happening at random to whoever is walking by when the perpetrator decides to throw a bleach bomb is it clear to you if this is racially motivated well if if you're

investigating and you find a pattern where each of the people that have been attacked are indeed black and brown students black and age and students what it what else am i to believe them i supposed to believe that even if they were simply just random on the campus bed as majority white that happens to be the the random attacks i happen to be on these black and asian students accept we can't just write that off as a coincidence now michael are you surprised to see something of this nature taking place at the university of texas and institution credited with having one of the most diverse student bodies around. i'm not surprised to see it happen anywhere and i think that we have to understand is that we are not so far gone from our our history of racism in this country that we're not still dealing with the vestiges of it and that we don't that people don't still harbor racist attitudes and if people

are still acting on races impulses or even even you know in some ways not just necessarily acting on races impulses but simply harboring racist ideas without even knowing it so i mean it doesn't surprise me that's going to happen anywhere but particularly when we've all internalized the sort of anti blackness or anti people of color attitude in this country now michael i know that you frequently write about race issues is something like this unprecedented or are there are similar incidents of this taking place across the country that that you've seen or heard of . attack people physically this way and to use this chemical is not something that i'm aware of happening you know widespread but i mean this is also indicative of the culture of college campuses where people are dressing up in blackface and holding racist parties where they're you know dressing up in you know traditional asian garb it white students that are you know appropriating all of these different cultures and writing it off as a prank and again seeing it not in the context of the history of racism in this

country but trying to essentially minimize the experience of black and brown people in this country what do you think the implications of this are and not just for the specific student but also for future generations of minority students seeking higher education. i think this is this is to me means that we have so much more work to do is far as this project of integration in it's not on black and brown students to be it to you know open up the hearts of their their white compatriots and say you know except to me it's on you know students of stupid white students white america to teach you know not just accept in but to teach and to racism and should be more accommodating and should be to make sure that these institutions that we're being asked to integrate into are welcoming and that they are there are openly hostile the students of color and now of course michael tomorrow is the

fiftieth anniversary of the march on washington marking the nation's fight to end segregation altogether and racial discrimination now looking at this incident at u.t. what do you think it says about the work that's still left to be done. says there you know just like i feel every single day that we have so much more work to do we have so much more to fight for and it's a radical project that we have to undertake and it's not simply going to happen overnight it's going to it's not going to happen with one single rally it's not going to happen with one march is going to take us working every single day together to fix this problem thank you michael that was michael dunn's al smith a contributor for the nation and a nobbler fellow at the nation institute. elsewhere in an effort to provide more information about government requests for user data facebook has followed google's lead and released its first ever transparency report and for many it probably comes as no surprise to learn that the u.s.

makes dramatically more requests for user data than any other country now in the first six months of two thousand and thirteen the u.s. made between eleven and twelve thousand requests for user data india came in second with three thousand two hundred forty five requests followed by the u.k. with one thousand nine hundred seventy five now the united states was also in the lead in the number of user accounts or requested the requests cover anything from basics to subscriber information to ip address logs or actual account content now facebook provided additional data on the different types of accounts the requests targeted and it looks like the united states sure likes facebook and here in the u.s. among other places we have quite the sweet tooth each year millions of americans are going down gallons upon gallons of soda and even with our attempts to make your favorite cola a little bit healthier there are some setbacks for more on that the residents lori harvest.

here's the truth about your diet soda it tastes like crap because it's made from crap genetically modified organisms feces to be specific i'm talking about this some static sweetener aspartame the patent for it is now online for everyone to see how it's actually made and it's actually made from the pool of g.m. bacteria here's how it's made specifically genetically modified to equalize by tyria are cultivated in tanks they designate proteins that contain asked bardic acid phenylethylamine amino acid statement that sees these is collected and then

treated to many chemical processes including methylation which adds to toxic alcohol methanol to the mix presto aspartame is made so if you like date you need chemical taste of aspartame and don't mind eating bacteria fee's for you it means you are free to consume so many foods and not worry about ingesting any calories god forbid aspartame is in your breath month cereal chewing gum flavored water ice creams coffee syrup juice drinks power bars putting ketchup yogurt vegetable drinks candy and pretty much anything that has the word diet in its name and that includes of course diet coke interesting lee enough coca-cola has just spent a lot of money to produce ads telling you how safe aspartame it in their ads they say that the safety of aspartame is supported by more than two hundred studies over the last fall. thirty years as sources they list the beverage institute and the

international food information council foundation coca-cola shows the former and the us government as a partner for the latter for further information about the safety of aspartame you can visit aspartame dot org which is owned by the calorie control council which is an international association that represents the food and beverage industry in other words the safety information about this sweetener food is controlled by those who profit most from it hardly unbiased while there are hundreds of studies which link aspartame to the kamya lymphoma other cancers liver damage you name it so if you're trying to decide whether or not you should ingest aspartame consider using this as a rule of thumb if it's literally made from chemically altered g.m.o. crap it might be crappy for your body tonight to talk about that

by following me on twitter at the red but. that does it for now for more on the stories we covered you can go to youtube dot com slash r t america or check out our website r t dot com slash usa you can also follow me on twitter at aaron aid and don't forget to tune in at nine pm for larry king now tonight's special guests are anti-gun and dean north stars of the hit t.v. series breaking bad that's all for now have a great night. placebos

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